REICH COMMUNICATIONS

Cracking the Code

 

So far, I’ve been reluctant to use QR codes.  I especially dislike being forced to use them to read the menu at a restaurant.  When faced with that situation, I always ask the waiter to bring me a printed menu.   

I have used QR codes in business, though, as another way to connect people to information from a client.  The other format is to use a bitly link to take someone to the client’s site, but that’s not always a simple matter from a cellphone.  That’s where QR codes come in.

I have seen QR codes used in TV ads from time to time – mainly in infomercials on cable.  But the mold was broken during the Super Bowl broadcast, when Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange platform, ran an ad that simply showed a QR code slowly moving around the screen.   According to reports in the trades, the ad pulled such a big response that the Coinbase server crashed because it got overloaded.

So, QR codes seem to work. They’ll likely become even more commonplace as more phones have the capability to use them.  More than 83 percent of smartphones today can scan QR codes, up from a bit above 52 percent only three years ago.  Industry experts say that number should hit 99.5 percent by 2025.

I guess QR codes are here to stay.

‘Failing’ New York Times is Soaring

 

Even as the president continues to refer to it as the ‘failing New York Times,’ the “newspaper of record” is enjoying record-breaking readership and subscriptions. 

A memo from the Times’ top editorial team says the paper now has 2-1/2 million digital subscriptions, a million print subscribers and more than 130 million readers every month. That’s twice the paper’s total audience only two years ago.

Ironically, the president probably has something to do with The Times' ballooning audience. With all the lies and "alternate reality" coming from the president and his White House henchmen, more people are now looking to media outlets they can trust for real and accurate news...The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major papers.

So thank you, Mr. president, for helping the New York Times grow.  Its digital revenues jumped from $400 million two years ago toward its goal of $800 million by 2020, hopefully offsetting ongoing drops in print ad revenues that are hardly exclusive to The Times.

The editors have declared 2018 as “the year of audience,” which means they intend to do their best “to compete for audience time and attention and demonstrate to readers that Times journalism is so valuable it’s worth paying for.”

130,000,000 readers a month....if that's what "failing" looks like, then keep on failing New York Times. We need you now, more than ever.

Clickbait in the Newsroom

 

McClatchy Media, which owns 31 newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, recently announced it is revamping its newsrooms to encourage reporters to do more reporting geared toward readers of it's digital rather than print editions.

On one hand, it is good that management is recognizing the growing importance of digital platforms. Some major papers like the n y times now have more digital readers than print.

But be there's a troubling aspect of the McClatchy initiative. According to a story in Media , the chain is having one-on-one sit-downs with reporters, analyzing their recent stories to see how many clicks, shares and likes each story got on the papers' online sites. And they are being coached, and eventually judged, on how much digital engagement their future stories get.

This means, according to the story, reporters will be pushed to give readers more of what they want, as measured by digital metrics.

That sounds good, in theory, but is it really a good thing for a news organization​?

Might reporters gravitate towards sensationalism in hopes of their stories getting more clicks? Might they put greater emphasis on celebrity news or high-profile court stories as a way to get more eyeballs, while giving short shift to important but less sexy investigative stories looking at local civic affairs?

While media companies are, after all, businesses, their business is very different from other companies that must give the customer what it wants in order to survive. Media have a responsibility to give what the customer needs, albeit in a way that upholds journalistic standards.

It's a tricky line. With luck, the McClatchy papers will find a good way to navigate that line while still giving readers what they need. Other papers, and the companies that own them, will be watching.  Hopefully this won't be the start of further degrading local news coverage.

"Failing" Media Booming

 

The "failing" New York Times is doing well, despite pronouncements to the contrary by the White House.  It seems that being in the cross hairs of the president is giving The Times and other "fake" news outlets a real boost.

The Times is seeing a real surge in digital readers, as well as in print.  The paper reports it now has 2.2 million digital readers, dwarfing the print circulation.  And what's even better news is that many are paid online subscribers.   

The paper is seeing digital revenues from online subscriptions and digital advertising getting to the point of offsetting the ongoing loss of print ad pages.  It’s a trend that’s been happening for the past few years, accelerated over the past several months by the outrageous political situation we’ve been enduring.

Digital subscriptions rose by 418% over the past six years, to $233 million, while print subscription revenues dropped by 2% to $648 million. 

Other "fake" news outlets are also enjoying a boom.  CNN and MSNBC are enjoying record numbers of viewers, as people are looking to get reliable coverage and analysis of the craziness in D.C.

And independent non-profit investigative news organizations like Pro Publica are seeing many new readers and a solid increase in donations from a public hungry for honest investigative reporting.

For major media, it seems that being called “the enemy of the people” by POTUS may actually be a good thing.

Dots and Dashes

 

How far we've come in communicating and sharing information.

On this date in 1838, 179 years ago, Samuel Morse demonstrated the first telegraph, sending messages using a series of electrical dots and dashes -- short and longer electrical pulses -- representing the numbers and letters that became known as the Morse Code.  Six years later, in 1844, the first commercial telegram was sent and over the next several years wires were strung throughout the U.S. to enable fast communication from city to city and eventually around the world.

When I was in Boy Scouts, I learned the Morse Code for a merit badge.  And then, in my early teens as a ham radio operator, I used it to talk with other hams around the nation and worldwide.  I'm a bit rusty, but I still remember the Morse Code. 

To get my ham license, I had to be able to send and receive messages in Morse Code at 20 words per minute.  Really good code operators could go at 30 - 40 words per minute, but even at that speed, it could take several minutes for a telegraph operator to transmit a message. 

Today we get impatient if our emails and texts don't come through instantaneously.

 

 

 

 

E-mail: Strong as Ever

 

It's hard to believe that email has been widely used for only about 20 years.  It is now the dominant form of business communication, far outstripping snail mail and faxes.  

We got rid of our fax machine about a year ago, after the only things we got via fax were paper-and-ink-consuming promos selling everything from discount travel to health plans to discount fax toner.  And there are many days that go by where the only thing the mailman delivers to the office are ad flyers, unwanted and very fat office and cleaning products catalogues and the occasional bill.  Some days, there is actually nothing in the regular mail.

What's happened?  It's all in email these days -- virtually instantaneous and free.  On a typical business day, I get upwards of 200 emails.

A survey just out, reported in Research Brief (via email), shows most of us check our email at least once a day.  Forty-four percent of us check email at least a few times a day.  Most of us (67%) check our email mostly via our smartphones, with the rest about evenly split between laptops, desktops and tablets. 

Before writing this, I did some checking to learn when email began.  For me, I was reluctantly pushed into using email by a client back in the early 1990s.  The client, out in Palo Alto, Calif. would have me draft a news release and then send it to them by fax. They would fax back their edits and have me fax back the final for them to review and give a final go-ahead.  Back then, I still didn't have a regular computer.  I was using a word processor.  I'd make the changes and then do a mass mailing to targeted media, making hundreds of copies, labeling envelopes and running them all through a postage meter.  The postage alone often cost $90 - $100 or more.

At one point, the client said either get a computer, use email or we'll have to take the business elsewhere.  So I bought a Compaq Presario all-in-one unit, only because the guy next door had the same unit and I felt if I needed help, I could just run to him.

Now, I can't imagine working without email.  (Thanks for the push, Rocco.)

Email officially began in 1978, my research shows, when an Indian immigrant working a summer job at a New Jersey medical school created a way for the office staff to share their memos electronically.  Siva Ayyadurai, then 14, gets the credit for the first email, despite some claims by others including a Ray Tomlinson, that they created email as early as 1971.  Those claims, it seems, have not been substantiated.

Even as late as 1982, there were only about 1,000 email accounts worldwide.  The explosion began in 1983, when it grew tenfold to 100,000, growing again by 2-1/2 times by 1985 and then doubling every two years till it reached a million in 1989.

The growth continued to skyrocket, hitting 5 million in 1992, 10 million in 1995, 25 million in 1996 and 400 million by 1999.  It crossed the billion mark in 2007 and 4 billion in 2013.

Could you imagine not having email today? 

   

 

 

 

The "King" Moves Over

 

TV has long been king of media, for decades taking the lion's share of marketers' ad dollars.  But it looks like TV will be surpassed by the young upstart -- digital. 

Recent news reports tell us it's finally happened -- something prognosticators have been talking about for years.  eMarketer says the ad spend on digital media will hit just a bit over $72 billion by the end of this year, squeezing past the $71.3 billion that advertisers are spending on TV in 2016.   

But the so-called "old media" TV, along with newspapers and magazines, aren't quietly going away.  Instead, they are ramping up digital platforms of their established brands, the oldies like NBC/Comcast, Disney/ABC, FOX, Hearst, Univision and Scripps, and buying into some of the digital newcomers that have been stealing their ad dollars.

"If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em" seems to be the mantra of the big guys.

In a recent report aptly titled "What's Old is New," Bloomberg gives a number of examples.  Comcast, which owns NBC, is investing in two new media outklets --n Cheddar, a business news platform aimed at Millennials, and a yet-unnamed offshoot of Politico.  Comcast also has partial ownership of Buzzfeed, Vox and afood oyutlet called Tastemaker.

Hearst, known for magazines like Cosmo, Marie Claire, Seventeen and House Beautiful as well as newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, is buying Complex, a group of websites covering fashion, technology, hip hop, technology and entertainment.  

Univision, the Spanish-language TV giant, is in talks to purchase Gawker, the site that went into bankruptcy after it lost a big invasion of privacy case against ex-wrestler Hulk Hogan.

Even a media "dinosaur" like Verizon, whose roots go back to Ma Bell, is very much in the new media business.  The phone/cable/internet company owns online sites like Huffington Post and TechCrunch and is in the process of buying Yahoo.  Plenty of ad revenues there.

So let's not feel sorry for the TV companies since most of them aren't just TV anymore.  They're following the money.

 

 

Which do you want first?

 

There's some good news and some bad news regarding print media.

Let's get the bad news out of the way.  Magazines continue to slide, with sales down more than 14%.  Total magazine sales dropped by 6.2 % so far this year, compared to the same period a year ago.  It's even worse for single-unit sales at newsstands, with a 10.8% drop this year.

Some of the harder-hit categories include celebrity and women's titles.  Food & wine, recreation and science titles moved up slightly.

In the "good news" category, more people are reading newspapers, although not in the more profitable print editions.  Newspapers last year were read by 179 million people, an increasing number of them accessing papers online. 

It's not all good news for newspaper publishers, however.  They continue to struggle as revenue from advertising and circulation dropped by nearly 4%.  Part of the decline came from lower digital ad revenues, which were down by 2% last year, according to Pew Research. 

Recognizing the changes and challenges, the Newspaper Association of America has changed its name to News Media Alliance.  The rebranding, says the group, is intended to recognize the new ways people get their news and how newspapers deliver it to them.

I hope the new name helps publishers go after more ad revenue from advertisers and their agencies who often look at newspapers as “old school.”  With readership at 179 million, whether on newsprint or online, the numbers are nothing to sneeze at.

Native Advertising -- Is it Deceptive?

 

 

 

So-called native advertising is ad content designed to look like the editorial content it's surrounded by.  We used to call it "advertorial" long before "native" became the current buzzword.

 

By its very nature, native advertising is deceptive, since it is intended to make the viewer think it's real news, coming from the media outlet's reporters or writers.  As such, it tries to pick up the implied credibility that would come with a legitimately reported news or feature story.

 

Not so.  Native ads are, after all, ads paid for and written by an advertiser.  You shouldn't expect native ads to be fair, balanced or even, unfortunately, totally accurate.

 

For years, advertorials in newspapers and magazines usually were labeled as ads or paid content, although often in small lettering that could easily be missed.

 

Then, as media went digital, the lines became blurred or disappeared altogether.  Online media, including widely-read blogs, went for the money, posting paid content without disclosing it was sponsored.

 

The Federal Trade Commission issued a ruling that all paid content had to be clearly identified.  I'm not sure if anyone has been fined or prosecuted for breaking that rule, but most legitimate media seem to have become more careful.

 

Despite this and perhaps proving that more noticeable identification as an ad is needed, a new study by a university in Georgia shows the vast majority of us don't recognize native advertising as a paid ad.  The study, reported in the Journal of Advertising, found that only eight percent of people surveyed identified native advertising as paid marketing messages.  So 92 percent were fooled into thinking what they had seen in print or online was real news or information.

 

No wonder native advertising has become the hot thing.

Cat & Mouse -- Avoiding Ads

 

The age-old question of "who sees my ad" continues to plague advertisers.

Digital advertising now allows advertisers to get a better read on who looks at their ads and how long they spend looking, as well as lots of other information about us that we'd probably rather they not have.  Ever wonder why, after you go to a site to look for information on travel to, say, Mexico, you all of a sudden start getting pop-ups and emails advertising destinations in Mexico?  It's called behavioral tracking.

But as ads appear everywhere, we consumers look for ways to avoid them.  It's almost like a game of cat & mouse.

With radio, simply hit the button to go to another station.  Now, we have ad-free satellite radio or subscription services online like Pandora. 

Back before DVRs or home video recorders, the only recourse we had to avoid ads on TV was either switch the channel (which pre-remote meant getting up to turn the dial) or leave the room to raid the refrigerator or take a quick bathroom break.  Now, we simply click and the ads that marketers spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in front of us quickly zip by. 

As our TV viewing habits are changing, advertisers are trying other ways to force us to watch their messages.  Video on demand (VOD) from the networks usually disable the fast-forward feature on your clicker, so you have to watch TV the old-fashioned way -- ads included.

But the hot area these days for ads is online.  We're close to the point where advertisers will be spending more money for online ads than for ads in traditional media.  But even as this is happening, we consumers are finding ways to avoid the ads aimed at us on our computers, tablets and smart phones.

Banner ads have been shown to have limited impact on consumers.  They're on our screens, but we tend to ignore them.  Advertisers now use pop-ups that dominate the screen and override the content you're trying to view.  Those pop-ups often have a box or circle with an "x" which you can click to have the ad go away.  But advertisers are making those boxes smaller and harder to click on, especially if you're seeing them on a tablet or phone. 

As a story in The New York Times recently said, it's becoming like the wack-a-mole game... trying to find the little "x." 

This silly game becomes frustrating for consumers, and it hardly endears them to whatever product or service is being advertised.

One possible solution is to take a cue from pre-roll ads that pop up on some You Tube videos.  There's a message, easy to see, that indicates that you can close the ad after 5 or 15 seconds ... and you see the time counting down.  The viewer knows there will be an option and that he or she will just have to endure 5, 15, or 30 seconds before getting to the desired content.  It's not as annoying as other pop-ups, and if the advertiser has created a compelling ad that catches you in those first 5 or 15 seconds, the consumer may opt to watch the entire ad, which could be 30 or 60 seconds, or even a lot longer.

It takes creativity.  You can't simply use a regular TV ad and put it online.  But if it works, it's win-win for both the advertisers and the consumer.  It's a lot better than playing cat and mouse to try to avoid an ad.